$10 chip puts Australia on the fast track

A new silicon chip developed in Melbourne is predicted to
revolutionise the way household gadgets like televisions, phones
and DVD players talk to each other.

The tiny five-millimetre-a-side chip can transmit data through a
wireless connection at a breakthrough five gigabits per second over
distances of up to 10 metres. An entire high-definition movie from
a video shop kiosk could be transmitted to a mobile phone in a few
seconds, and the phone could then upload the movie to a home
computer or screen at the same speed.

The "GiFi" was unveiled today at the Melbourne University-based
laboratories of NICTA, the national information and communications
technology research centre.

"I believe in the longer term every consumer device will have
this technology," said project leader, Professor Stan Skafidas, who
with his team spent almost a decade developing the chip.

Hotly contested area

Short-range wireless technology is a hotly contested area, with
research teams around the world racing to be the first to launch
such a product.

Professor Skafidas said his team is the first to demonstrate a
working transceiver-on-a-chip that uses CMOS (complementary
metal-oxide-semiconductor) technology - the cheap, ubiquitous
technique that prints silicon chips.

This means his team is head and shoulders in front of the
competition in terms of price and power demand. His chip uses only
a tiny one-millimetre-wide antenna and less than two watts of
power, and would cost less than $10 to manufacture.

It uses the 60GHz "millimetre wave" spectrum to transmit the
data, which gives it an advantage over WiFi (wireless internet).
WiFi's part of the spectrum is increasingly crowded, sharing the
waves with devices such as cordless phones, which leads to
interference and slower speeds.

But the millimetre wave spectrum (30 to 300 GHz) is almost
unoccupied, and the new chip is potentially hundreds of times
faster than the average home WiFi unit. However, WiFi still
benefits from being able to provide wireless coverage over a
greater distance.

Victoria's minister for information and communication
technology, Theo Theophanous, said it showed Victoria was at the
cutting edge of IT innovation.

He praised the 27-member team which worked on the development of
the chip. The high-powered team included 10 PhDs students from the
University of Melbourne and collaborated with companies such as
computer giant IBM during the research.

"This new technology will dramatically change the way data and
content-rich information is managed in the office and the home, as
well as enabling new applications," Mr Theophanous said. "The
possibilities are endless."

'Several breakthroughs in one'

For Professor Skafidas, the chip is several breakthroughs in
one. It includes a world-first power amplifier that is only a few
microns wide, with a micron being one 300th the width of a human
hair.

It also has world's first signal mixing and filter technology,
and a switch that isolates the transmitter and receiver so they do
not interfere with each other.

There is about another year's worth of work on the chip before
it is ready to be marketed to the public, he said, and the team
still needs to develop technology that injects data into the
transceiver.

Professor Skafidas said he sees several ways the technology
could be put to use.

It could be used to transfer data-rich content such as video
around the home between different storage and display devices, and
it could help turn a mobile device into a "shopping cart" for
data.

A mobile device could also become a fully-fledged computer
through the GiFi, simply by placing it near similarly-equipped
peripherals such as a screen, extra storage, optical drives, a
keyboard and mouse